Atril is blurry, engrampa is not (sway, scale=2)

I’m running sway on NixOS 19.03. My display is scaled by two with sway output option. For some reason atril from mate.atril looks blurry as do pluma, caja and eom. Meanwhile engrampa from mate.engrampa scales excellently and looks crispy clear. All of them seem to use GTK3, does anyone know what’s the difference and how can I make all MATE apps look crisp?

The blurry apps are those which are being run under XWayland. Basically apps that don’t natively support Wayland. From what I have read from the sway developers they consider it an XWayland bug and will not be addressing it, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of movement to address it on the XWayland front either.

This is a fairly wonky solution with a few rough edges but what I’ve done is elected to no scale my hidpi monitor and set Xft.dpi: 192 in my .Xdefaults file so that a number of X apps will scale using that value.

I usually end up double scaling things for natively supported apps but that is done on an app by app basis and not all of them support this. The apps I use frequently seem to mostly allow this but there are some where I just have tiny controls and text. Which makes this not ideal but depending on your frequently used applications it may work for you.

The long term strategy is for all apps to eventually support Wayland natively using newer versions of GTK, QT, or other frameworks at which time scale=2 will be the correct solution. For me Firefox is the critical one but they’re working on it and making a lot of progress.

Rechecked that and it’s true. In this case, my question mutates into “why only one MATE app supports Wayland natively if all of them are built with the same /nix/store/pgrmcvhxjnq7s94dp16rjnhs9mjr9sgm-gtk+3-3.24.5.drv”.